EX-MAYOR IS NOT THE FIRST SAN DIEGO ‘MO’ TO LOSE MOJO

What is it about San Diego that could give birth to two gifted golden girls, two athletic Maureens who rocked the world but, in the end, seem cursed?

What are the chances of one city giving birth to two shooting stars whom besotted headline writers loved to call Mo?

This moby line of succession begins with Maureen Connolly, the best female tennis player ever to wear white. Three years running, in the early ’50s, “Little Mo” was voted the world’s top female athlete by The Associated Press.

Raised and coached on San Diego’s public hard courts, primarily Morley Field, she was the first woman to win the Grand Slam, all four major championships in one calendar year.

Little Mo was the city’s postwar symbol of youth, vitality, optimism. The world knew her — and loved her like crazy. And then, at age 19, it was all but over. A horseback accident in San Diego shattered her leg. As a player, she was done. She married and moved to Texas, but the Mo story, already tragic, gets worse. At age 34, she died. Cancer. The year: 1969.

In relative obscurity, another young athlete, a swimmer, was preparing for an unlikely star turn on the political stage.

In 1971, this Maureen the Second, a 25-year-old P.E. teacher at a Catholic school, one of 13 rambunctious O’Connor children, stunned San Diego by winning a seat on the City Council, the youngest member ever elected. She’d go on to run for mayor against Roger Hedgecock, lose, but then win in a special 1986 election.

For six years in office, “Mayor Mo” was the most mercurial, most frustrating public official imaginable, a freewheeling paradox the likes of which we’ll never see again.

She’d frequently take off from work in the middle of the day and go to the movies.

She was the Down and Out Mayor, spending the night incognito as a homeless person, and yet she was probably the wealthiest mayor San Diego ever, having married the much older Robert Peterson, the Republican co-founder of Jack in the Box whose holdings exceeded the dreams of avarice.

And yet, despite this rocket rise, she always had the common ballsy touch — and a touch of luck.

She went into the roughest neighborhoods during the L.A. riots to tamp down the racial rage. It was so Mo.

She rejected mandatory water rationing during a drought. In what was widely called the “Mo Miracle,” the rains came, seemingly at her divine command. So Mo.

But she spent an inordinate amount of political capital on a glitzy Soviet art exhibit that many saw as too rich for the city’s blood. She proposed a “storybook” downtown library at Lane Field, a harbinger of the grand civic monument taking shape today.

And then, just like that, she was gone from the San Diego stage, handing the torch to another young woman, Republican Susan Golding, who also had married an older, wealthy, politically connected husband in Dick Silberman.